As the end of the year approaches, the price of bitcoin has hovered above the $60K region and with 18.8 million bitcoin in circulation, bitcoin’s market valuation is over $1.16 trillion today. Meanwhile, the number of tokenized bitcoins in existence today has grown significantly over the past three years, reaching 408,210 bitcoins worth $ 25 billion today.
More Than 400,000 Wrapped, Synthetic, or Tokenized Bitcoins in the Wild
Wrapped, synthetic, or tokenized bitcoin has become a growing trend during the last two years and nine months. Bitcoin.com News reported on one of the first projects on January 30, 2019, the day the Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) project kicked off. Since then, there have been a whole lot more tokenized bitcoin projects and by July 2019, WBTC in circulation eclipsed the Lightning Network capacity.
There are now a multitude of tokenized bitcoin projects such as BEP2, HBTC, RENBTC, SBTC, PBTC, OBTC, TBTC, Mstablebtc, RBTC and LBTC. Out of all of the aforementioned tokenized bitcoin protocols, including WBTC, there are approximately 408,210 tokenized bitcoins in circulation worth $ 25 billion today.
WBTC holds the lion’s share of tokenized BTC with 231,659 tokens in circulation today. The coin BEP2, otherwise known as BTCB issued by Binance, has around 105,099 tokens circulating today. Meanwhile, the other tokenized bitcoin projects have much lower supplies, and the third largest tokenized BTC project is backed by the Huobi trading platform.
There’s 39,884 HBTC (Huobi BTC) today and the valuation of the entire HBTC market is $2.4 billion. HBTC is followed by RENBTC (16,818), SBTC (4,775), LBTC (3,367), RBTC (2,528), PBTC (1,786), OBTC (1,254), TBTC (792), Mstablebtc (248), respectively.
Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain Command Lion’s Share of Tokenized Bitcoin
Ethereum is the largest blockchain in terms of the amount of tokenized BTC leveraged on a network. Eight of the 11 projects that issue packaged, synthetic, or tokenized bitcoin products use the Ethereum chain. BEP2 (BTCB) stems from the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), RBTC is issued by the RSK network, and LBTC is issued by Blockstream’s Liquid network.
The two tokenized BTC projects that have grown exponentially since their launch are WBTC and BEP2. Both projects are the most dominant with an aggregate of 336,758 tokenized bitcoins or 82.49% of all the tokenized BTC in existence.
